Case Studies – Mapserver

Hectares BC – Biodiversity BC on behalf of a broad partnership

Biodiversity BC and its government and non-government partners were looking for regional-level environmental statistics. Refractions proposed a new approach to generating GIS summaries, using the power of a relational database and web tools to provide GIS analysis to users who previously had no access to it.

The Open Geospatial Consortium runs regular “testbed” projects to field-test new concepts in geospatial interoperability. Refractions was a part of the OWS-3 initiative, and built a uDig-based “GeoDSS” client to provide access to several other OGC standard services, including a prototype GeoVideo service.

Western Forest Products wanted to move to an open source infrastructure to roll out internal data gathering applications. Refractions helped set up the initial infrastructure and built a template application for landslide reporting.

The Regional District was rolling out a new 911 dispatch system, and knew that keeping rural route address points accurate and up-to-date would involve collaboration with far-flung municipalities. Refractions built a web-based collaboration system using standard technology ready to integrate with the District ArcSDE system.

The US Army Corps of Engineers set up Mapserver to provide online viewing of their various inventories in Oracle Spatial. In order to provide access to an additional internal community of users with ArcMap8, they needed to make the data available using an ArcIMS internet service. Rather than re-configure their server back-end to support ArcIMS, they engaged Refractions to enhance the IMSEMU, a package the provides ArcIMS-compatible ArcXML services using the Mapserver rendering engine.

To integrate ocean observations with the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure (CGDI), the British Columbia government contracted to build an OpenGIS™ standard portal. Refractions delivered a system that allowed on-the-fly discovery and viewing of WMS layers, on-the-fly re-styling of WMS layers, and session management. The system used ArcIMS, OpenIMF, J2EE, and Mapserver.

Refractions integrated a mapping system based on the Mapserver open source web mapping engine into the existing VISTA on-line analytical (OLAP) data warehouse infrastructure. The new system acts as another “view” of the data, so any data query created in VISTA can now be viewed as a table, a chart, or a colorful thematic map.

AT&T Wireless needed to roll out web map services to a public audience, but their proprietary software was too slow and expensive to scale up. Refractions built a pilot project on open source software and free data that demonstrated a 10-fold performance increase and no licensing overhead.

The British Columbia Ministry of Health was charged with creating an access program to cover costs of medically necessary travel. But how much would it cost? Who was traveling for treatment? Where were they traveling to and from? Refractions analyzed 50 million records from the medical insurance database and delivered a report on travel patterns and interactive map application for exploring the data.

Refractions helped LAUSD add a mapping component to their OpenACS content management system. LAUSD had built an infrastructure tracking solution in OpenACS, but needed a mapping component, Refractions delivered one using open source components that integrated with the LAUSD technology.

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